Being a VTuber is INSANE!

Vtubers, what are they? They're like these semi-animated, usually anime, usually with boob jiggle physics personas. They've been around for a long time, and for an artist, an animator who's also been on this platform for a long time, to not know pretty much anything about them, a little bit embarrassing. So, I'm going to fix that in this video. We're going to do a deep dive into what and who are Vtubers, how did they come about, what transformations have they gone through, and where are they today, and can I make one or be one? Is it hard? Is it easy? I don't know. Let's find out. VTuber stands for virtual YouTuber, and they're an online entertainer who uses a digital avatar instead of showing their real face. Oh, look at me. I'm Jazza, and I'm a VTuber. Oh, jiggle jiggle. The avatar reacts to the streamer in real time. So, I think that that's a key defining factor of Vtubers. It's a performance, like a pro wrestler. Now, apparently, there's a divide in the community about what constitutes a VTuber, some of which are referred to as PNGtubers. What even is a VTuber? An online entertainer that uses a virtual avatar. A virtual avatar, like a PNGtuber. So, in conclusion, get off my OH MY GOD. Cinema ch- calm down. There's clearly some defensiveness in this community. You can present your persona in any gender, any species, any age, any color, but let's go back to the very beginning. In 2011, the very first person with a CG avatar in a sort of vlog-style live vibe video was released on YouTube. Japanese creator Ami Yamato. The idea of this digital live vibe avatar really sort of starts around here. Sorry, I'm doing mouth sound effects to save on post-production. In 2014, something happened that would propel VTuberismness into the stratosphere and that was the release of FaceRig on Steam. Face tracking software that could animate digital avatar from a webcam. Keep in mind, there was no such thing as a VTuber at the time that FaceRig launched on Steam. FaceRig changed that at least to a small scale and with facial animation for everyone. Now, let's get to actual VTubers. November 2016 This is also a time when Twitter wasn't a vile cesspool. So, AI started releasing videos and within 10 months, so by mid 2027 had 2 million subscribers and was the fastest growing channel in Japan. That's a quick way to legitimize a niche. So, here we are in 2017 and all of a sudden you have this extremely fast growing, fairly easy to reproduce, extremely popular medium. Of course, the first thing that's going to happen is business comes into it. I don't actually know if the agencies are like beloved or hated, but one of the most notable ones being Cover Corp founded by Hololive who debuted Tokino Sora as their first talent. And apparently a big influential force at this time was a company called Nijisanji. Like, look at this. These are all VTubers that Nijisanji does. It just there's so many. Nijisanji did a lot of live streaming and sort of live gaming content that became the thing to do and also the thing to watch. By 2020, there were over 10,000 active VTubers on YouTube. This Hololive group made this even more of a worldwide phenomenon in September of 2020. They launched the English speaking branch of their talents, featuring people such as Mori Calliope. Did you get it? Amelia Watson, and most NOTABLY GAWR GURA. — [screaming] — WITH 4. 65 MILLION SUBSCRIBERS, Gawr Gura debuted in June 21st, 2021, and also set a record of having over 1 million subscribers within the first month of debuting. Now, this was also the year that Twitch added the VTuber category to streamers because the popularity was growing so much. And in that year, VTubing grew over 467% as opposed to the year before. So, live streaming VTubers really became a thing. Top-tier VTubers now did concerts and had music releases. They did voice acting, merch, brand deals, and even conventions. This is all news to me because I just thought they were cute little anime characters that I didn't have interested in watching the content of, but over a billion views just for the top like few thousand VTubers from

2025 onwards. Now, are they still a big and growing thing? I'm not 100% sure, but it's certainly apparently very accessible thing. But it also has at times been a controversial thing. The Taiwan incident, which occurred in September of 2020. The VTubers Kiryu Coco and Akai Haato referenced Taiwan as a country or region in YouTube analytics on stream. This triggered massive backlash from Chinese nationalist viewers on Bilibili, which is like a Chinese video viewing platform. Cover Corp released conflicting statements supporting One China on Bilibili and called it insensitive in Japan and English. Both talents were suspended for 3 weeks, but harassment got so severe that Hololive shut down its entire Chinese branch by the end of 2020. Their English branch is kicking off crazy successful, but because of the Taiwan incident, they stopped streaming in China. And another very notable turn in the controversy side of things is around 2024-2025. Also in this era where obviously there is a lot of success, a lot of money being thrown around. This era began what was known as the graduation wave. Graduation sounds like a really nice term. You might think, "Oh, wow. So like they graduated college or something? " But no. Actually, graduation is a term that's borrowed from idol culture that basically means your dog is dead, kiddo. When a Vtubers graduate, they are permanently gone. They lose the ability to collaborate with their old friends inside the company. They lose all of the progress that they've made on their channels. They lose all of the community creations. They no longer have the rights to any of it most OF THE TIME. — WOAH, THAT'S INSANE. And it is because the image, the persona that is created is owned by these companies that are the catalyst of their success. So of course there's a lot owed to them for the fact that there is a career there. But at the same time, the entire personality, persona, the voice, and the lot maybe a lot of the content ideas and all of that is a partnership between these personalities and these parent companies. Such a nice way to call a massacre. And no one, apparently, was safe because the biggest one, Gawr Gura, has graduated citing disagreements with management and company direction. So now when you go to Gawr Gura's channel, there are of course no recent videos because she graduated last year, 1 year ago, 10 months ago. It's just so wild to me, but I just have to say this animation and the song and slaps. And that's it, she's gone. At she went with a bang. Well, at least that covers the basics of the evolution of the niche, but suffice it to say I feel somewhat informed now. So, let's spend some time making some Vtubers in this video and seeing how easy it is and how to get into it. You know, now that I think about it, most Vtubers have human bodies for the most part. And if you like human bodies, you're going to love our upcoming book, Epic Anatomy. This is a fantastic segue. This is a bit of an aside, obviously, but we are launching a Kickstarter very soon. So, please go sign up to see when we launch. Early birds will get a discount and we are hoping to self-publish and manufacture and produce and distribute an incredible art book which dives into the in-depth of how to draw the human body in a way you have never seen before. A fun way that isn't overly complicated and is actually guided between the chapters with a graphic novel featuring the story of a mad scientist and his cute little robot companion, Cubot, as they attempt to create an army of superhumans ready to take over the world. But, unfortunately, Dr. Evile cannot do that without perfecting his understanding of anatomy. So, you'll get to join him on that journey and learn to draw anatomy in really fun and engaging ways that make what is otherwise a notoriously very complicated or difficult or dry subject into something memorable and fun and cool as anatomy depicted is and should be. So, go check out the Kickstarter and to sign up to the pre-launch page because if you're there nice and early, you will get a discount on the book. We have worked on this book since 2024. So, that's over 2 years that this has been in production. I'm so excited and I know you're going to absolutely love it. Check it out. Link's in the description. Now, back to the thing that I completely randomly tangent did from shamelessly. — Test. Testing recording. Hey, would you look at that? I am a Vtuber. Well, technically a PNGtuber. So, the first and easiest setup that I use is called Discord reactive and it's basically just like a Discord extension which swaps PNGs based on if it detects you talking or not. It can add a little bounce when you start talking like that, or it can continuously bounce like this, which makes it look like you're bouncing while you're talking. Now, I've drawn a lot of my Jazz Avatar back in the days, I just used a bunch of these that I modified to make my Discord swapping alternatives, and this is the end result added into OBS and chroma keyed and added in post to this video. And I followed a helpful guide by

in 2026, and would you look at that? I'm here. But we're just getting started. What's next? — Okay, so now we've stepped it up a bit. This next one is made using VeadoTube, which I think I pronounced that correctly. And as you can see, out of the box is way more dynamic. Like they're still basically open mouth and shut mouth, but it's detecting the voice and matching it up quite nicely, and also adding intermittent blinks, which you control. It really wasn't that much more complicated to set up. I still just have a closed mouth and an open mouth with the addition of blinking, which you can actually change. Do you know what? Let me show you in the interface here. All right, this is what it looks like under the hood. I just have a webcam, and I'm using the webcam's audio. But as far as this functionality is concerned, what you see is what you get. It's the same level of complexity as the previous one, but aside from having closed mouth and open mouth, it also has closed mouth with a blink and an open mouth with a blink, and you can select how much you blink. So, if I want a really blinky character who blinks lots of short and sharp and is really very quite unnerving and very jittery, shaking a lot, and very violently moving, I CAN DO THAT IF I WANT TO. AH, THIS FEELS MORE LIKE ME. HELLO. SO, aside from actually having like pretty decent basic functionality, you can also trigger different states. So, if I wanted a version of me with a party hat or with like a game controller or something, you can add different ones and select them and then when you're streaming, it could sort of pick those and be those based on what you're doing. This is actually really cool. I really like this software. It's free. It's really simple. I can see why a lot of people like it and especially for people who maybe don't feel confident with a webcam or showing themselves on camera. And also if you're creative, this is cool. This is a bit more than that. This is fun. This is really fun. I can see the use for this and I highly this program is really cool. Go check it out. I'll link to all these in the description. Now we're going to step it up a bit. As you can see, my uh PNGtuber persona here is quite a bit more complicated and a lot more fun than what we've done so far. So let's break it down. This did take a little bit of custom drawing. So if that isn't the sort of thing you're into, Suru Draws makes a pretty cool customizable PNGtuber models thing. I'm sure there are more out there too for fairly cheap and also with ways to sort of test it out. As you can see, I made a simple little Jazza avatar thing in someone else's style. It's not really what I'm after, but I'm sure you could have a play and find something you like in there. And again, free to try and play around with and there's a bunch out there. But how did I make this glorious animated little guy here? Oh my god, this is so much fun. Well, of course I stuck to using the Jazza avatar, but rather than using all the old drawings that I did a long time ago, I thought I'd do something new. Using it as a template, but shaking it up with a bit more of a rougher brush and tweaking the proportions to be a little more cartoony and cute. This really is a matter of just breaking it down into chunks. — Now honestly guys, this seriously takes me back to my Flash animation days. This is pretty much exactly how I used to have to construct characters for animation back when I did work in Adobe Animate and prior to that, Macromedia Flash. Don't let my avatar fool you. I'm old. And with all of these parts exported, I imported them into PNGTuber Plus, which you can get again for free on Steam. Which is insane that there are so many resources out here to just play and be creative like this. And you get such cool results. I mean, just look at me. — Anyways, it was a little confusing at first. There are tutorials out there that you can follow. It's also worth noting the animation works on a sprite-based system. Once I figured this out, it just meant making the mouth animate on more than just an open and close. It was a matter of creating a wide image that just had all of the frames equally distributed apart. So, that technically my talking mouth animation sprite has four different frames. Two of them are just the open mouth, and then it alternates between closed mouth and teeth. It's not going to be perfectly lip-synced, but that's really not the point. This is way more complex and really cool compared to a lot of the other PNGTuber approaches. And this is awfully close, in my opinion, to VTubing. Oh, yeah. The jiggle physics, which could be used for all sorts of creative purposes, were a little tricky to figure out at first, but once I got the hang of it, it was actually really straightforward and very satisfying and fun to put in place. And these, combined with the intermittent blink swaps, actually makes for a really dynamic talking vibe. With a little bit of custom rotation of the arms so that I sort of move and bounce around as I express. And here it is. This is me and me. This is genuinely really fun. And there's no video capture in this. This is just audio, and it feels really custom and expressive to what I want. It makes me want to be a PNGTuber. This is genuinely very cool.

And it's free. Seriously, have some fun. Get creative, guys. I I'll link to all this stuff in the description. Shout out to Ziggy for his guides in making this super easy to do at various levels. I could say I'm pretty confident now were I to choose to become a PNGTuber, but could I become a VTuber? Let's find out. All right, the plan was to create a VTuber with the same sort of fun and simplicity with which I created a PNGTuber. Turns out, it's not that simple and it's not that fun. So, I started off with the most beginner-friendly free VTuber creator and that is Mannequin on Steam. This was very limited if you want to create, well, something as simple-looking as me. And also, really just hardline right in that anime category. Please don't flame me in the comments. I am just personally not a huge fan of this particular aesthetic of anime. But also, I tend to just personally prefer the western style of character animation. This is about as close as I got to recreating the Jazza avatar. I kept trying to make it have a big head and it kept canceling that. Anyways, I made my Jazza and exported it and the next step was to use Inochi Session, I think it's called, and Puppet String, which is like the face tracking software. And honestly, I'm sure I could get it working if I were more motivated, but I just couldn't get it working. Like, Puppet String picked up my face. There it is, moving about, testing my face. I don't know if it was the puppet settings I had on my mannequin, but I just couldn't link my face from Puppet String to my mannequin. So, I gave up on that and thought I'll try some different software. Moving on to Vroid Studio. And this, like the other one, felt like a character creator with very limited options, basically shoehorning you into making anime characters. But my god, there isn't one single like spiky front hair tuft option except for this weird freaking alfalfa thing. That's the closest I could get. So, because I wasn't feeling free to express myself in the way I wanted, I moved on from that and thought maybe this Nizima Live thing was the thing to do. Like, this seems to be really robust and really impressive-looking and okay, you have to pay for a subscription up front. Well, I'm not going to do that. So, I went back to Inochi this time paying for Inochi Creator. A one-time payment of over 40 Australian dollars, where I was immediately greeted with an extremely complicated setup. Like I couldn't even figure out where to start with this, and it doesn't give you any sort of default templates to start off with. And it seems from the trailer and from the resources I can find to be extremely complex and capable of incredible things that I have no idea what to do or where to start. I could of course import my mannequin character, which I am not incredibly fond of. And I could play with the meshes, I could go in and customize things, but I really am not motivated to you guys. This is just not my vibe. So, I'll probably refund this one on the Steam store. Not for me. With one final crack, hoping I'd find something to let me be a VTuber, I tried Live 2D. And like the Enutci one, it seems just like another can of worms. The ability to create custom rigged, very complex, gravity jiggly characters, but you have to know what you're doing or work with a template that you like. And this takes me really to I think one of the main things I learned in researching this video. A lot of people who get into this commission a custom puppet. It is extremely complex, and even in just trying to spend a day getting into this, it really just felt like hitting my head against a brick wall. So, if this is something you really want to do, be prepared for a steep learning curve, or at least fork out a couple hundred bucks or more to get someone who knows what they're doing to make exactly what you want. And I mean, look, people who build a career on this and use these characters in hundreds of videos and build large audiences end up of course considering it money well spent. But for me, well, I really enjoyed drawing this little avatar. I really enjoyed the results. It was free, and I would totally dive in the deep end and make a whole bunch more of these, cuz it's very, very fun. And I'd encourage you to give it a go. But holy crap, the VTuber thing, I don't know if that's a slippery slope I want to go down. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the idea and I see the appeal for people who want the facial animation to match their movement, their expression so they can grow you know and it does the stuff. This is enough for me. I love this little guy. He's cool. And it's also like super easy to go from like drawing something to have it react and animate to just my voice. I don't have to worry about webcams and stuff and to be able to just plop it into a stream. I see the appeal. I'm in the team PNGTuber camp. Sorry YouTubers but that's just me. I guess what I've learned about this whole thing today is really about finding the fit for you both aesthetically and technically. And if you have a clear result you're after, if you have technical outcomes you really want to achieve, well that will determine the route you go down. But I will not be going down the VTuber route. I feel like there's a whole realm of like there's controversy. PNGTubers

versus VTubers. I hope I'm not adding fuel to any fires here but uh PNGTubers for the win. Well, that's it for this video. Thank you so much for watching. This has been a real treat full of surprises and interesting discoveries and controversies. I hope you've enjoyed the journey and the outcome as much as I have and of course watching me suffer. Make sure to like this video, subscribe for more fun with art and creativity and until next time, I'll see you later.